This is my twin brother, Alex. That badge on his sleeve does indeed say "U.S. Border Patrol." The squinty-eyed guy with the anchorman hair is former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.



I've always been kind of fascinated by my brother's martial proclivities, not only for the gun stories but also because I suspect, though he's never come right out with it (in our family, razzing is a table sport), that he's a Republican. When he was a kid he used to draw these incredibly intricate and devastating gun battles between F-14s and aircraft carriers and the like. They were pretty good, actually, though the carnage used shock our mother, a deeply humane and left-wing sort of person. Who now says things like: "I have to remind myself that you guys shared a womb."

Alex and I began this weird little email volley some weeks back. I anticipated a segue from questions about the Border Patrol into probings of his more James Bond-like activities as an Air Marshall (eg. "Do the flight attendants know you're packing?") But, alas, it wasn't meant to be:

CG: Official job title?

AG: Usually I am a "Senior Patrol Agent" but for two months they have me as an "Acting Supervisory Border Patrol Agent," which is really boring.

CG: Patrol Agent as distinct from the guys who hang around the drive-through booths?

AG: We guard the border in between the port-of-entries [sic] (or booths for you, Char). Casa Grande station is responsible for about 20 miles of linear border as well as areas away from the border--surrounding communities near Casa Grande, the Phoenix Airport and bus station, smuggling roads leading north from the border, and Interstate 10 between Tucson and Phoenix.

CG: Smuggling roads. Very cloak and dagger. Do you just cruise up and down in tinted-window Suburbans or do you hang out in the bushes, so to speak, waiting for the criminals to show up?

AG: Usually we wait in the dark for vehicle bugs [magnetic vehicle sensors] to go off in the desert then we drive using IR [infrared] lights and night-vision goggles to a specific spot where we lay out tire spikes and wait. The vehicle is usually a pickup with 40 or so people crammed on top of it. The vehicle stops and the people run into the desert. It's a free-for-all. You trip up and grab what you can. We seize the vehicle and the smugglers never see it again. But we're talking $400 pickups or stolen trucks out of Phoenix.



CG: After you round them up, what happens next?

AG: We usually confiscate the vehicle and transport the aliens to the station. We have a really neat computer program called AFIS that can read fingerprints, access the FBI database and obtain a complete criminal record in 3 to 4 minutes. It's really amazing. Everyone is run through the database. We usually have a 10-20% "scumbag ratio" in every group--10-20% have prior criminal records or warrants on them. Smugglers have built their own road network in the desert. The picture was taken actually 30 miles north of the border.

CG: So you hang out in the dark (eating cheese sandwiches? flossing?) waiting for these guys in nylon windbreakers to crash the border. It's a numbers game, no? Run like hell and hope you're not one of the poor sucks who gets caught. They look sort of harmless and bewildered--I think there's even a child in amongst them. You can see how it's easy for certain factions of the American populace to feel sympathy for illegal immigrants. I mean, they don't exactly look like hardened crims.

AG: Well, I don't feel one bit of sympathy for them. There's always one way to avoid problems in the desert--don't cross the border in the first place.

CG: What happens after processing at the station? A free ride back to mom?

AG: Usually they get trip back to Nogales port-of-entry to be kicked back to Mexico. If they don't have a criminal record that is.

CG: You know I'm going to blog all this.

AG: [Silence.]